Posts Tagged "posting"

Some months ago now, as I was perusing the Dragon Age Facebook page, the DA team had posted a wonderful piece of fan art by a Deviant Artist named Alteya who’s other work can be found Here. I was initially very impressed with the piece of art, but what truly astonished me was the amount of controversy that this seemingly innocuous piece of art had managed to create. This depiction of a fan’s Hawke caused out cry about what constituted the “canon” Hawke in Dragon Age II. On one side of argument, we have a collection of players (mostly, if not exclusively male) that insist that Hawke is canonically male. On the other side, which is much less polarized by gender, arguing against the notion of male Hawke as being canon or the notion of their being a canon at all. screenshot taken of fan discussion on Dragon Age Facebook page screenshot taken of fan discussion on Dragon Age Facebook page screenshot taken of fan discussion on Dragon Age Facebook page screenshot taken of fan discussion on Dragon Age Facebook page This got me thinking, did I believe in the idea of a canonical version of the story? My immediate answer was “no” but then I stopped to think about it. If we treat the game as a text, then the text has multiple narratives it can tell and each of those narratives have a host of different readings. The game itself adapts and changes based on the decisions a player makes at the time of character creation and more so throughout gameplay. My favorite initial character set up of “Female” “Mage” Hawke leads to different sorts of narratological interpretations then a friend of mine’s set up of “Male” “Warrior” Hawke. If we consider the narrative as a sort of nebula of possibilities, each decision we make impacts the potential outcomes. At the outset, we narrow our narrative’s potentiality fairly significantly. The choice of mage vs. non-mage is rather important, it dictates which of your Hawke’s siblings survives and how your character will be perceived (as much as the game is capable of handling such things) in the world. Mage Hawke is just going to logically be more sympathetic...

Tumblr is one of the many blog sites available and popular on the Internet at the moment. One of its primary uses is to allow an ease of publishing for short content that can be reblogged or passed on to others to see. The website is easily a transmedia fiction platform, as blog posts allow the formation of transmedia fiction. A big part of this is because, similar to Reddit, the commentary on posts becomes an actual part of the post, while comments on many other blog and social networking sites can easily be ignored and can have little visible impact on the original story. The combination of multiple posts creates an shared story, often using multiple mediums. If you are not familiar with tumblr, tumblogs can be devoted to a number of subjects like cosplay portfolios, webcomics, art blogs, teaching history, cataloging sexism in comics, or just reblogging things you think are cool. Numerous professionals and companies also keep tumblogs to support their products and communicate with their fans and consumers (e.g., kellysue, gailsimone, kodanshacomics). Blog posts on their own can include a number of things, including pure text, music, videos, links to other websites, GIFs, pictures, fanart, fanfiction, and commentary of some sort on any of the above. As posts are reblogged and additions are made, they become a shared story and people can add any of the above onto the post. They can respond to a text post with links or add other commentary like their own personal experiences, answers to questions, questions for other writers on the post, jokes, puns, rants on the subject or a related subject, etc. Posters often take a video and GIF it with added text for humor or find the video a screenshot is taken from and GIF it. The array of options easily allows for multiplatform storytelling. Let’s look at an example post. I will be using screenshots of the post to focus on the different parts, but to see the whole post in better detail, just go here. This is a post that has been moving around tumblr for quite some time now. The original post is a group of pictures to show the RGB Colorspace Atlas by...